Report from the front lines

It's been two and a half weeks now since the last Armory update came through. With the loss of the Horseman, and the reduction of the invasion pressure... well, we're holding the line against boredom, but just barely.

Bad attempt at military-related humor aside... there's a question that every casual player needs to ask himself, and that's the question of alts.

One definitely needs a main. With achievement chasing, rep grinds, instance-dropped recipies and so on, one needs to assign a 'favourite' character that will get the majority of the attention. The big factor here is tradeskills, and the Bind-on-pickup rewards that only the holder of the tradeskill has access to.

For the hard-core raider, this is less of an issue. The gear from raiding is going to be better, and one can assume a friendly guild that will assist the raider in the initial gearing up process. Outside of raids, though, tradeskill gear can often be amongst the best one has access to, and this makes tradeskills even more tempting. Over and above that are tradeskills like enchanting and inscripting, which allow you to optimise or improve your gear even further.

This does lead to the temptation of two tradeskills, in the hope that an extra slot or two might get even further optimised. Unfortunately, tradeskills need a range of reagents, and this is where alts come in.

The first question is: Alt or Auction House. Are you willing to level a second toon for the express purpose of grinding for your main, or are you instead willing to drop gold into the vagaries of the AH?

For me personally, as a healer-specced class, grinding gold for the AH is less of an option... I need to use an Alt anyway (or continually respec), so I might as well make the Alt feed my tradeskill needs directly. This does, annoyingly, take time away from the various things the main needs to do, but I guess I can console myself with the knowlege that the tasty new purples the main will eventually make will certainly make the main's grinds a bit easier :D